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Comment by tjpnz | Hacker News Reader

I would put a lot of it down to Japanese craftsmanship coupled with relatively experienced engineers (average age in their Kyoto office is 40 IIRC). Their selection process is notoriously rigorous too and goes far beyond the usual LeetCode questions you'd get at a FAANG company.

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> coupled with relatively experienced engineers

I disagree. Nintendo has good engineers but so does many of the other studios. For me what sets Nintendo apart is not their code or technology, but their game design and game direction. The way they seem to craft their game-play and game mechanics to have everything it needs but nothing more, and then couple it with the perfect match for game aesthetics with unmatched consistency.

Do Nintendo keep their teams together longer?

You usually can’t get a great engineering team by throwing a bunch of good engineers together, it takes time and work.

I don’t know much about the game industry but from what little I have heard it seems there is a lot of churn.

This is a Japanese company so most of their engineers will be hired directly from university and typically stay on until retirement. Based on what I've heard they build large groups of engineers who'll stay together more or less permanently. Then they'll rotate these groups between different projects. Sometimes they'll be on a game, other times they might be doing something with hardware. So the groups end up multidisciplinary.

That’s basically ideal for a lot of engineering work, so long as you keep fresh ideas coming into the group somehow so it doesn’t stagnate …

> I would put a lot of it down to Japanese craftsmanship

This is such an orientalist and borderline racist view it’s crazy. If it were true then it would also imply the other japanese game devs also affected by it. There countless bad games from Japan, don’t even have to walk far from Nintendo just look at the Pokémon games and how GameFreak release them with 0 optimization. And then the countless misses from Square Enix, Bandai Namco etc.

I think you're missing the point. My family in Japan, and their social/business networks, are exactly like this. Detail oriented and loyal to a fault. While they are not software engineers the expectation is to do your best. Some of it is done through company policies or implied in a social context. That is not true for all Japanese people but it is true of a large majority. I have first hand experience.

I guess it depends on the company and what it produces also.

Japanese are also extremely attached to their past and culture, which shows up in the game how its almost like a modern mythical representation of both old japanese myths and an obsession with technology.

There, is that racist too?

The result is beautiful, I love the whole "ancient technology" concept in it, which is not something we have in our world (except for pyramids perhaps).

> If it were true then it would also imply the other japanese game devs also affected by it.

That's a pretty racist argument, to generalize this way. Not all Japanese are the same, not all share the same mindset, education and philosophies.

It’s weirder to suggest everywhere in the world works exactly the same and culture has no impact.

I haven’t worked with Japanese companies but Chinese companies work couldn’t be more different than western.

the director aoji aonuma has to be the oldest looking salaryman i've ever seen. i think that says a lot.

long hours, very high level of expectations, fine tuned attention to good gameplay design, and the protection of higher ups execs like miyamoto from bean counters.

Very tired of people saying something is 'racist' when in actuality the comment is just a generalization of a certain people.

Racism is hating a cultural group or having a prejudice against them, not making a comment on it.

If anything, OPs comment is a compliment on Japanese work.

No one minds attributing the wild spunk and ambition of USA startups to “American exceptionalism. I think it’s pretty reasonable to say that a certain trait is broadly associated with a culture without implying EVERYONE in that culture has to exemplify it.

Grow up man, this is some elementary stuff that you shouldn’t need explained to you.

I don't think it is racist to highlight an aspect of a culture and how it might at a group dynamic level causally influence the outcome of something.

The claim that Japanese culture causally leads to better craftmanship might be wrong. As you've mentioned, there are plenty of counterexamples that argue against Japanese culture having the claimed causal influence. But this doesn't make the original claim racist nor even borderline racist.

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